Bulleted lists are a very common way to represent sets of data. It is common, for example, to list line-items on a whiteboard during an organizational or planning meeting. If such information is needed in electronic form for archiving or later distribution (e.g., via email), it is useful to be able to create an electronic document from an image (e.g., photograph) of that whiteboard.
Character recognition technology is relatively widespread for converting such information into electronic form. However, simply recognizing the characters does not preserve the actual structure of the bulleted list. If the user wishes to modify the contents later (e.g., adding additional line-items, removing existing line-items, etc.), it will be necessary to first format the data into a list manually. This can be complicated by the fact that the text may be free-form, and separation between line items can be lost. Finally, if character recognition is unreliable (particularly an issue with hand-written text) images of text may be interspersed in the electronic text, or portions of text may be skipped. Regardless, users still wish to capture bulleted lists and convert them to electronic format.